How do I Involve More than the Usual People?


In Chapter 1, you learned the importance of being clear about what you want to accomplish and what kind of involvement is needed. This determines the kind of people you need to include.

You probably have some people in mind to include in the work already. Some people are obvious choices because they match the work to be done due to the passion they exhibit, the knowledge and experience they bring, or the personal and political clout they wield.

But beyond these obvious choices, it's helpful to have a framework for thinking about whom to include, one that will challenge you to think outside the box about those you might want to invite. Think beyond the people whom you normally invite, the "people who do everything" in your organization or community. (You know who they are—the usual suspects.) Make a deliberate effort to include people who may stretch, challenge, or change your usual way of thinking.

A police department in England was working on the design of a new jail cell. In an effort to stretch their thinking, the design committee decided to include members of a group most often ignored, though most directly affected—the prisoners themselves. The prisoners came up with a number of important contributions. For example, they pointed out that installing the cell door so that the hinge faced outward would reduce suicides by eliminating one surface on which a rope or bed sheet could be hung. This life-saving insight could only be offered by someone who had spent long hours of loneliness and despair staring at a cell door—a vivid example of the value of including in your work participants who are normally excluded.

For all but the simplest work, get the advice of others before you shape your final invitation list. Simply asking the question, "Who else needs to be here?" will open up possibilities you otherwise would have missed. This model's broad involvement, at a very early stage in the development of your work, sets a tone that will be increasingly valuable as the work proceeds. Remember John Donne's observation: "No man is an island, entire of itself."

If you are considering whom to invite to the next staff meeting, ask those present at the current meeting, "Who needs to be here?" If you are considering a larger initiative, then you need to convene a group to help plan whom to involve that mirrors those involved and impacted.

Here is a framework to help you involve more than the usual people. It identifies six important categories to consider, each of which brings something different to the work. They are:

  • People who care

  • People with authority and responsibility

  • People with information and expertise

  • People who will be personally affected

  • People with diverse points of view

  • People who are considered troublemakers

Let's talk about these categories in more detail.

People Who Care. People who care have passion, consider the work important, and are ready to devote their energy to ensuring a good outcome. They come in many types, including people who have a stake in the outcome of the work and people whose children the work might influence.

One way to find out who cares is to ask for volunteers—people who have a choice about whether to participate, not those who are told that they must come. When we volunteer time and energy, it shows we care.

In Naperville, Illinois, a town of 130,000, the local school district was planning a conference to create a vision for students in the twenty-first century. They decided to include some 300 people in creating the vision. The invitation list included students, teachers, and administrators; parents; representatives of local businesses that had partnered with the school system; and members of the larger community, such as a professor from the education department at a local university, local religious leaders, and city and county officials. They also wanted volunteers from the community, so they created a video for local cable television explaining the work and asking community members to participate in the conference. Articles in local newspapers were also used to invite participants.

Three hundred people became involved, including those who worked for the school system and were invited as well as volunteers from the community. They all gave two and a half days of their time to the effort, demonstrating vividly the depth of their commitment to the Naperville school district and its educational mission.

Some initiatives are more conducive to volunteering than others. If your work includes tasks that can be performed with minimal specific expertise, on an open schedule with flexible guidelines and quality standards, then volunteering can play a significant role. In our experience, there are few projects to which volunteers cannot contribute.

The next question is how many volunteers should be included. We've seen organizations dedicate anywhere from 5 percent to 70 percent of the slots in each group to volunteers. If they get more volunteers than there are slots available, participants are selected randomly—drawing names from a hat, for instance—and in public, so that the process remains transparent.

People with Authority and Responsibility. People with authority and responsibility are important to the success of the work. We need them because they have unique information to share and control over necessary support and resources. People with authority and responsibility can run interference with the powers that be, win or grant approvals, and champion the work at higher levels of government, business, or civic society. They also follow up on the work and ensure that it is institutionalized or folded into the organization as the organization grows and changes.

In a meeting about restructuring the human resources department of an international airline, two options emerged, each with strong support. After extensive debate, a vote was taken. Option A won by a single vote. It was a moment of truth for the group. Given the narrow margin of victory, would debate resume, or would the organization move forward?

After a moment of silence, the corporation's vice president for human resources spoke up. "Clearly we have a house divided. Both options are attractive. But a decision must be made. In keeping with our democratic tradition, we will abide by the will of the majority. We'll follow Option A."

Of all the people in the room, only the vice president had both the authority and the responsibility to make this decision. (She also had the personal courage to do so.) If she had not been in the room, it's likely that the debate would have continued for the rest of the day. Instead, the group was able to move on and successfully implement Option A.

People with Information and Expertise. People with information and expertise offer crucial insights from many parts of an organization or community. They represent various hierarchical levels, functions, and periods of organizational memory. They also provide technical expertise that may be needed, such as financial acumen, marketing savvy, or computer skills.

When a major hospital system wanted to create a vision for the future of their organization, the planners understood the importance of including a broad range of information and expertise providers. Their list of invitees included physicians from every hospital department, nurses representing each health care function, support staff (such as secretaries and maintenance workers), administrators and corporate staff members, patients (both satisfied and dissatisfied), insurance company representatives, health care consultants, and members of similar organizations that had conducted similar projects. Only by gathering all these diverse people in one room could the system hope to develop a future vision that was both broad and soundly based in the realities of the changing world of health care.

People Who Will Be Personally Affected. People who will be personally affected by the work need and deserve a place at the table. They might include workers whose jobs will change, clients whose experience of the organization will be altered, members of other organizations whose contacts will be affected by the project, and community members whose lives will be impacted and changed.

Involving a range of people who will be affected by any change sends an important message of empowerment. At one high-tech manufacturing plant, the supply chain that controlled the flow of raw materials into the factory as well as the development and shipping of finished products out of the factory was badly flawed. Several large meetings were held where customers, suppliers, workers, and managers came together to discuss the problems and create a new design for the supply chain.

In the midst of these conversations, one line worker at the plant who had been having difficulty getting a crucial part from a supplier took it upon himself to call the president of the supplier company. He explained the situation and got the part he needed the next day. Being involved in the supply chain design project had enabled this worker to take ownership of the problem and move forcefully to solve it.

People with Diverse Points of View. People with different points of view may include people who have minority opinions, people opposed to what is going on, people who play a different role in the organization or community, or people who represent a particular race, gender, age, or other significant characteristic.

You may feel reluctant—perhaps unconsciously—to include people with different points of view. After all, won't dissenting voices just slow us down and prevent progress? Actually, the opposite may be true. Our experience has shown that the more points of view that are heard and understood during the development of any project, the more innovative the solutions devised. Bringing in people with different points of view is the only way to uncover what they all have in common and are willing to work for.

Troublemakers. The sixth category of people to include is the troublemakers. Who are the troublemakers? In the typical workplace, organization, or community, most people know who the troublemakers are. They are the resistors, the dominators, and the detractors. They are the people who refuse to be team players. They irritate, annoy, alienate, and just plain bother everyone they come into contact with.

Why include troublemakers in your work? One reason is that troublemakers are centers of organizational energy. We prefer having the troublemaker using energy inside the work rather than stirring up trouble and distrust from the outside. If the troublemakers are working with us, we can welcome them, try to see the world through their eyes, treat them with respect, and find what is valuable in their input.

At a company where planning was under way to implement a new program of self-directed teamwork, one union steward was generally considered a troublemaker because she was always filing grievances. After much internal debate, the planning group decided to invite the steward to join. To widespread surprise, she became instrumental in leading the effort. The reason? For the first time, the steward had found a place where her voice would be heard and her concerns would be taken seriously.

In Figure 2.1, we present a simple tool to use in thinking about whom to include in your next work initiative. When first using this tool, fill in the types of people such as customers, suppliers, and partners, then in the next column brainstorm the actual names of people to include.

start figure

Work Name: _____________________

Categories

Types

Names

People who care

 

 

 

People with authority and responsibility

 

 

 

People with information and expertise

 

 

 

People who will be personally affected

 

 

 

People with diverse points of view

 

 

 

People who are considered troublemakers

 

 

 

end figure

Figure 2.1: THE WHOM TO INVOLVE TOOL

Some people find a visual map useful in helping them see who should be involved. This is another way to trigger your thinking to be more participative. Remember the school district that was working on a vision for the twenty-first century? After thinking through the categories of people they wanted to include, they created a visual map like the one in Figure 2.2 as a tool for identifying types of people that ought to participate. As the planning meeting began, they wrote the name of the district in the middle of the map, then invited people to call out the kinds of people that they saw as key to this event. The recorder wrote them on the map like branches on a tree. As a result, they saw that several of the categories produced the same kinds of roles and they were able to more easily attach names to the roles.

click to expand
Figure 2.2: THE WHOM TO INVOLVE MAP FOR THE NAPERVILLE, ILLINOIS, SCHOOL DISTRICT 203




You Don't Have to Do It Alone(c) How to Involve Others to Get Things Done
You Dont Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done
ISBN: 157675278X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 73

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